Harry was at Cairo, and I could not go to him. And though that made
me feel helpless, and almost mad with inaction, yet in my heart I
dreaded meeting him, seeing him, taking in the bitterness of it
through the eyes. I was a coward, you see, and my love for him a
poor thing at the best. But there are some who will understand how I
felt, and will forgive me.

His letters were all right, not a word of complaint, for Harry never
grumbled, and many a good story of the hospital and its patients and
its staff. But there was something else, a kind of gentle
seriousness as if life were different now. And I read my own misery
into that, and pictured him a man devoured by a secret despair,
while he smiled his brave undefeated smile in the face of all the
world.

The weeks passed, and I braced myself for the coming ordeal. Then
everything came with a rush at the last, and there I was at the docks
giving my brave soldier his welcome home. It was not any easier than
I expected. I tried my hardest, as you may guess, to be all joy and
brightness, but when we were alone in the motor together my eyes
were full of tears, and I broke down utterly. Poor Harry, poor Harry,
why are physical calamities so awful and so irrevocable?

He let me cry, and then he said suddenly, "Come, Mary, look at the
real 'me,' don't bother about that old leg, but look into my face,
and tell me what you see. There is something good for you to see if
you will look for it."

He said it so strangely that I was myself in a moment, and doing what
he told me just as in the good old days before the war. And then I